"On October 1 1982, Joel's sixth studio album, 52nd Street, was the first commercially released CD album... Which means CDs are 30-years-old today. It's worth noting here that 52nd Street wasn't a new album - it was launched initially in 1978, but it was selected for relaunch on the new digital audio disc, rolling out alongside the first CD player - the Sony CDP-101 - in Japan. But of course, the CD didn't spring up overnight - the road to launch started long before 1982." I'm still 100% CD when it comes to music. The act of physically holding a new album in your hands for the first time and gently placing the disk in the tray can't be matched by pressing a download button behind a computer.

"I'm one of those oddballs that can actually hear the difference between a cd and a compressed file (note though that cds themselves are compressed, just to a lesser extent)."

Switch your consumer electronics player with a PC with a good audio player installed and you won't be able to tell the difference. Any real audiophile or videophile always plays things on a PC, and preferably with open-source software. For some reason, open-source players offer the highest precision. Proprietary software players and consumer electronics a)take shortcuts in the decoding part and b)distrort the audio or video to give average Joe a "more impressive" version of the content.